Housing Resistant Forms of Life

By Hamed Khosravi

When life
itself become a political project, any distinction between political action and
labor, public and private, city and dwelling, ceases to exist.[1] Contemporary bio-capitalism
is nothing but the strenuous attempt to parasite and make productive any form
of living far beyond the body and the spatial-temporal coordination of its
movement, subsuming the whole complexity of relations, affects, desires as crucial
driving forces of development.

The most
typical domestic activities, traditionally concealed as ‘unproductive’ and
‘servile’ unpaid labor, have become paradigmatic forms of exploitation, to the
extent that household management, reproduction, affectivity and care have
become, today, the fundamental qualities of the ubiquitous field of labor
precarity.[2] In this sense, dwelling
itself has been stripped out of its spatial organizations and traditional
protective clichés, becoming the most profitable living performance of value
production, triggering a progressive hybridization of the domestic space
through a parallel and opposite feminization of labor and an internal
masculinization of the Existenzminimum.[3] This
differentiation indeed is tended to neutralize the life itself. The emergence
of such forms of life has progressively eroded the strict division between
public and private space, blurring Hannah Arendt’s distinction between work,
labor and political action. The city becomes at the same time a continuous
field of exteriorized publicity and a sequence of autonomous, privatized
interiors.

This way of living stands in
opposition to the post-war reconceptualization of the domestic space when sets
of living norms and standards were formulated into spatial codes that prevailed
the architecture of the house. Indeed these norms were political apparatuses
though which the state power was applied to the life of the citizens. In this
mechanism of control, ‘style’ replaced the ‘living’ itself and citizenship, with
its political commitment, was replaced by social norms and public behaviors.

Tehran is a
paradigmatic case of the latter phenomenon, in which collective life
proliferates almost entirely in interiors. Commercial, productive and living
activities are confined between the same architectural types, which stretch
throughout the metropolis as a continuous field of urbanization. In particular,
the house is the place where all the economic, political, social, theological
and class conflicts are deployed.

This form of
organization is not entirely new in the Iranian-Islamic city. Its archetype is
the medina, an inhabitable wall
enclosing an internal space conceived as a ‘terrestrial paradise’. As analogon
of the state, the enclosure is a micro-cosmos recapitulating the collective
organization of the political body. Thus, the Iranian house embodies many
meaning: it is a theological entity outside history and the mythical foundation
of the Islamic state; at the same time it is the engine of production and the theater
of everyday resistance.[4] Michel
Foucault, in his famous articles from Tehran during the 1979 revolt, was
fascinated by the political power of this duality, which he saw as the original
contribution of Shi’ism: the possibility of a religion that gave to its people
infinite resources to resist state power.[5] By
focusing on the post-war architecture in Iran this essay will
read the dwelling as the theater and the factory for this ever-present
political constituency, for a continuous state of revolution.

In Tehran, during the
post-war period, the immediate need for massive reconstruction not only
resulted in developing new construction techniques and planning and design
processes, but also paved the way for direct and fast implementation of series
of political projects. In a way those were attempts to instrumentalize
technology and modern concepts on behalf of particular ideologies to tame the
socio-political tensions. This period is mainly characterized by the project of
secularization, at the center of which was interior architecture and
urban form; it not only happened through large scale planning apparatuses, but
also initiated in careful engineering of the form of living in domestic spaces,
while particular furniture, partitions and accessories was introduced to
administer and govern the Iranian society at large.

Notes:

1. Arendt designates three
fundamental human activities, each of which corresponds to one of the basic
conditions under which life on earth has been given to man: work, labour, and
action. Together they constitute the vita active. Hannah Arendt, The Human
Condition (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1998).

2. ‘Labour is the activity
which corresponds to the biological process of the human body, whose
spontaneous growth, metabolism, and eventual decay are bound to the vital
necessities produced and fed into the life process by labour. The human
condition of labour is life itself.’ Ibid, 7.

3. Existenzminimum or ‘The Minimum Subsistence
Dwelling’ was theorised as a minimally-acceptable living space, density, fresh
air, access to green space, access to transit, and other such resident issues
to support the minimum condition for life. It became the main theme of the
second CIAM in 1929 ‘Die Wohnung für das Existenzminimum’ with the focus
to be on design solutions to the problem of high rents for the low wage
earners. See Eric Paul Mumford, The CIAM Discourse on Urbanism, 1928-1960 (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 2000), 27-43.